Melancholy
by sentiently
Summary: Mikhail/Bea *** The months after Mikhail loses his eye, during which he meets Bea.


He wondered how he would thread a needle with only one eye.

No one would ever respect him again. It wasn't as if he had much experience to begin with--he had come straight from his secondary school in Kiev to the medical military academy in Leningrad.

_(His mother's stained handkerchief clutched in his fist as he watched his family turn into amorphous blurs. Rain trickling down the window as he pressed his nose into it, exhaling, forcing the tears back. Willing the image of his mother collapsing into his father's arms at the bus station to disappear.)_

His entire life revolved around sight. Anyone charged with piecing a man back together in the middle of a battle (sometimes at night) had to have exceptional vision and steady hands. He supposed his hands were still reasonably steady, but did it matter?

Half a man, lying in a bed halfway across the world from everything and everyone he had ever known. Half a heart. Half a face. Half ready to die, half ready to see if he could be half the man he was before.

--

He hated the way she looked at his wounds. She dressed them in silence, staring sadly with her enormous black eyes as if she was willing them to heal faster, to close, to not get infected again. And there was just enough determination in her gaze to make him think that she believed she just might do it.

--

They healed. The scars were still ugly, but the wounds were past the point of reopening. He found that he liked revisiting the memory of her smile as she peeled back the gauze to find a wound that was not inflamed and oozing. Since that day her mood had improved drastically. She hummed while she opened the curtains of his room, brought a sprig of flowers in a vase to decorate the otherwise bare nightstand.

But even when she smiled, there was an air of solemnity about her. He thought this was mostly due to the way her habit shrouded her face, fell shapelessly over her body. It stifled her. She bathed him three times in one day and didn't return to his side for two. Propriety wrapped around her waist with a thin white band.

--

He hadn't seen his face yet. He had heard two nurses talking the first day he regained consciousness. What he didn't learn from their whispered conversation he gathered from the odd throbbing in his face and the fact that only one of his eyes was covered. He wished he hadn't had to figure it out on his own.

One day the nun who made him feel so very uncomfortable and so very grateful came to sit on the side of his bed. She did not smile: instead she chose to gaze intensely into his eyes--eye. Singular.

He noticed that she was clutching something wrapped in heavy brown paper at her lap. She looked down at it and then back at him.

"It's time," she said quietly.

_I know,_ he thought, his mouth disobeying his command to speak.

--

It hadn't been as bad as he expected.

She had gotten rather close to his face as she removed the stitches, and he got to stare at her for a very long time. Her skin was flawless, a rich coffee color. And her eyes were just as black from a few inches away as they were from across the room.

As she cupped his chin in her hand, examining his right eye socket, he couldn't help but think of his mother and how many times he had forced her to do this very same thing in his boyhood.

--

She cut his hair while he shaved.

He found that shaving was a more difficult endeavor than he remembered. After the fifteenth time he cut himself with the razor, he wondered why she didn't just take over for him. She had propped a mirror up on a box on his lap so that he could watch himself as he shaved and oversee the cutting of his hair. He hadn't realized how wild his hair had gotten until she ran a comb through it and the comb was immediately trapped in a knot. She painstakingly worked out all of the knots and proceeded to cut his hair into something civilized.

He was beginning to see a bit of himself in the mirror. Even the eyepatch she had brought him didn't look so foreign.

--

"My name is Beatrice."

His eye fluttered open at the sound of her voice. He was met with total darkness, and for a moment he panicked, thinking that it must be daytime, that he must be blind. His eye adjusted and he saw that although it was dark, he could see her outline. The outline of her body.

She wasn't wearing her habit, but instead something that actually clung to her form.

"Bea--Beatrice."

For the first time in months, he spoke.

He heard her breath catch in her throat.

She crawled into his bed, laying next to him. He thought about how long it had been since he had felt the warmth of a woman against his skin and couldn't remember.

Beatrice pressed herself into the crook of his arm. He could feel every inch of her body against him but was sincerely glad that she appeared to be content with just this, as he doubted he could satisfy her sexually in his present state.

She sighed deeply, inching up to kiss his neck. This was how she slept: her face buried in his flesh, half straddling him, one hand on his chest.

--

The clinking of silverware awoke him. He opened his eye blearily to see Beatrice preparing his breakfast for him. She poured his tea and buttered his toast with unnecessary finesse, but it amused him all the same.

She was wearing her habit again. Her expression was placid, her movements filled with her usual effortless grace. It was as if the night before hadn't happened, and she was simply feeding him breakfast.

But he could tell by the way she glanced at him and then away very quickly that she sensed that things had changed.

She fed him in the silence they had grown accustomed to during the four months she had been his caretaker. She wiped crumbs off the bedspread, straightened the curtains, and began to exit the room when he reached his breaking point.

"I don't understand," he said, his voice still unsteady due to lack of use.

Beatrice stopped in the doorway and shut her eyes tightly. She turned her head slightly and replied, "Neither do I."

This was as close to an answer as he would ever get.

--

"It can never be," he said simply as the bus rattled along the country road.

Beatrice wouldn't look at him. She had been charged with escorting him to the train station so that he could meet his mother in Kiev. Seven months after he arrived at the abbey, his mother's letter arrived and he was prepped for transport.

They had made love for the first time the night before Beatrice brought him the letter.

It had been delicate at first, as he had just begun to get used to walking again. They had to be quiet, which was harder for her than it was for him, and she had cried softly into the pillow afterwards.

She didn't look at him at all until he was about to step off the bus, when she not only met his gaze but kissed him deeply, her eyes glazed with tears but her face dry. Beatrice kissed the skin right below his eye patch for "good luck," just as she had done so many nights when she laid in his arms.

She maintained a stoic facade until she thought he was already inside the train station, and then her face crumpled and she climbed back onto the bus with her head down.

So like his mother.

--

And it was his mother who greeted him in Kiev, running, crying, so happy to see her eldest son that she could hardly contain the joy. She saw his missing eye and cried, she saw his feeble smile and smiled wider, she saw her son, broken in so many ways, and felt grateful.

He saw her and he saw _her_, happy and sad simultaneously, a combination reserved solely for him.

One man, half a heart.


End file.
